An Empirical Study Of Explicitation In Chinese Translated Fiction

This paper adopts a corpus-based quantitative and qualitative approach to testify explicitation as one of the translation universals in translated Chinese fiction in terms of standard type-token ratio, high-frequency words and their coverage, modal particles, modal adverbs, adversative conjunctions, explicitation of cultural elements and standardization of the dialect, taking Lady Chatterley's Lover and its three Chinese versions as a case study and original Chinese novel Fortress Beieged as a comparative corpus, verifying or contradicting the occurrences of explicitation as one of the translation universals, therefore this paper provides evidences for explicitation hypothesis and can offer a chance to help people get a deep understanding of the nature and the process of translation, and moreover provide evidences for the beginners who are involving in translation to use the strategy of explicitation properly.Up to now, scholars do not reach a consensus in the explicitation study concerning about its definition, research object and methodology. The initial study of explicitation focuses on the Indo-European languages, thus, the previous conclusions need to be further testified in non-Indo-European languages. Different translations of the same novel will be investigated, which could not only get rid of the shortcomings that monolingual corpus excludes the source language while being used for exploring features of translated texts, but also clearly shows whether the explicitation occurs because of the translation universals or translators'individual preference.Explicitation in this paper means that comparing with original texts and non-translated texts in TL, translated texts become particularly clearer in terms of meaning and more explicit in terms of logical codenrence, thus making them easily understood by the TT readers. This study intends to testify the explicitation comparing LCL with its Chinese versions and analyses the data qualitatively searched by WordSmith Tools. Meawhile, LCL will be compared with the original novel FB, and then the comparable explicitaion of three versions can be testified. Furthermore, the three versions will be compared with each other, and it can be found whether the different degree of explicitation exists or not. Finally, if explicitation does exist in three versions and the degree of explicitation is different, the motivation of explicitation and different degree of explicitation among three versions will be explained from the angles of language, culture and translation purpose and TT readers'expectation.The study confirms the existence of explicitation, and further proves that comparable explicitation appears more prominent than inter-language explicitation, however, the degrees of explicitaiton of Rao and Zhao are higher than Feng as TT readers'expectation and translation purposes of the three versions are various.